ThReads Must Roll: the new, improved rolling fantasy, science fiction, speculative fiction &c. thread

i finished new york 2140. it was kind of hectoring/didactic (i guess that's hard scifi for you?) but it won me over in the end. that was my first KSR. i've put the wild shore and red mars on my list.

a lot of the plots/characters seemed completely unnecessary and it could have been a lot shorter. you can say that about most dickens too i suppose.

Haven't read the Mars books, but as I said Wild Shore is my fave KSR (novel, though also enjoyed early Asimov's stories, collected with others in hisDown and Out In The Year 2000).
Science Fiction Encylopedia's take is good:
the Wild Shore lucidly examines the sentimentalized kind of American sf Pastoral typically set in a seemingly secure Keep-like enclave after an almost universal catastrophe has transformed the world into a Ruined Earth. Sheltered from the full Disaster, Orange County has become an enclave whose inhabitants nostalgically espouse a re-established American hegemony, but whose smug ignorance of the world outside is ultimately self-defeating.---but doesn't incl. the fun, expansive, Earth-loving, wild shore sweep--incl. some breeziness, though some of that is set-up for dystopian beware--got tired of that kind of set-up elsewhere, but he earns it here, I thought---been a long time since I read it---can't guarantee that TWS isn't digressive and padded w subplots like Green Earth in my experience and 2140 in yours. But worth it, probably.

It’s my favorite KSR too but I haven’t checked in since Mars

I kept on thinking of Dickens when I was reading 2312 though not entirely sure why - it wasn't stuffed with characters or side plots. Something about a romantic narrative alongside or used as a comment on a dire need for social change, though that could describe hundreds of books & writers.

Now reading The Outside by Ada Hoffman, humans meddle with forces normally forbidden by the AI gods and unleash - well, something, Lovecraft is invoked but so far we're led to believe we're dealing with science not fantasy. Not sure this is better than the 'adequate YA' critique above but it's readable - surprisingly more readable than Too Like the Lightning, I thought, then I realised that was by a different Ada (Palmer).

i read ghostwritten and cloud atlas back in the day and liked them; i even watched the first 30 minutes of the cloud atlas movie one night when i couldn't sleep. (my god what they put tom hanks through)

should i read subsequent david mitchells?

seems srsly addicted to the ~these short stories (which may or may not be symmetrical!) are linked by mystery!~ structure

Today Jeff VanderMeer tweeted images of three upcoming books: his novel A Peculiar Peril, out next week, and two later in the year: The Big Book of Modern Fantasy, with most of my fave heavy hitters on the cover, though I suspect that it will eventually go wildly uneven, like its Science Fiction predecessor; there's also something with a nice jacket, though don't see title---hope yall can see his pix here:
https://pbs.twimg.com/media/Eb3HB52XkAc3sof?format=jpg&name=4096x4096

Hope that Patricia A. McKillip and Naomi Novik are in the middle one too.

The last one is a reissue of the ambergris trilogy https://www.goodreads.com/book/show/50403446

Slight Vandermeer (/Strugatsky) vibe to my latest read, Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett, in that there's a zone with unusual flora & fauna that does strange things to your pysche. This one feels like adult fiction, hard to put a finger on why but making me question all my life values and goals is a good sign. It also deals with philosphy of mind in a way that's right up my street, when a couple of characters had a laugh about the fact that "you can hear supposedly smart people these days saying to one another that 'consciousness is an illusion'" I knew I was in for a good time.

> Beneath the World, A Sea by Chris Beckett

this, iirc, is one of the 1000 kindle monthly deals got this month (i went through all 86 pages of results yesterday, bought 2 things, one of which i already have a p-book of). yes:

https://www.amazon.co.uk/Beneath-World-Sea-bestselling-Trilogy-ebook/dp/B07FN7P4Y7/ref=sr_1_1

(Gibson - Pattern Recognition, Ovid - Metamorphoses)

The way blurbs and review synopses are written continues to confuse me. Why do we need to know character and place names? When blurbs say things like "it's a story of love, redemption, retribution, honor, sacrifice, responsibility", are some people saying "oh wow, those are exactly my favorite themes!"

I've talked about this a few times but I really want to know what people look for in a review or blurb.

Personally, I want to know the style, setting, moods, flavours and things that are going to grab certain kinds of people: horses, dolphins, spiders, food, sex, geology, dancing, martial arts, mermaids, specific cultures etc...

the blurbs are there to assure you that these other authors approve of this author/book, not to actually describe it

it's just marketing. fortunately there are now many other avenues to discover whether the book involves dolphins, sex or dancing

Do the marketer think if your eyes glaze over it or instantly forget what you just read? Are these working for other people?

I mean the main text blurb more than the supporting author blurbs. And reviews often do these things.

http://www.isfdb.org/wiki/images/5/54/DPSGNLPHLV2019.jpg
Nice recent Kaluta cover.

There is a terrible new show on Shudder called Blood Machines, which I’d fee; irresponsible recommending to anyone, but (at the very, very least) I respect its commitment to recreating airbrush-styled cover images from 1980s RPG manuals & scifi

*feel

I've been thinking about seeing it. Some people have said the visuals are strong enough to justify it.

this keeps on cropping up in my instagram, been meaning to investigate. no idea what shudder is.

http://file770.com/discover-the-old-continent-ninety-remarkable-european-speculative-books-from-the-last-decade/
Spent a long while reading this. Writers and fans from many countries were asked about the best books that hadn't got an english version. The Hungarian section interested me most. But all across europe I felt like there were quite a few stories featuring dumps, trash, garbagelands. There's an interesting bit about the Estonian genre classification.

Why were Felix J Palma and Tom Crosshill mentioned for works that are already in english? I guess they could still use a boost but Palma seems quite popular (first time I've heard of him).

In the comments were conversations about the names Wordpress can't publish correctly and this link to a similar list of classics from all the time preceding.

http://www.concatenation.org/europe/european_sf_classics.html
This article is a decade old and some books by Alfred Doblin, Gerard Klein, Manuel De Pedrolo, Kurt Steiner and probably more have got english translations since.

Reminds me, The New Yorker recently incl. some previously (?) untranslated Kafka narratives, ace and concise and Rolling Speculative in the way of K., from Lost Writings, due from New Directions Oct.10:

Selected by the preeminent Kafka biographer and scholar Reiner Stach and newly translated by the peerless Michael Hofmann, the seventy-four pieces gathered here have been lost to sight for decades. Some stories are several pages long; some run about a page; a handful are only a few lines long: all are marvels. Even the most fragmentary texts are revelations. These pieces were drawn from two large volumes of the S. Fischer Verlag edition Nachgelassene Schriften und Fragmente (totaling some 1100 pages).

That's from Amazon, with some interesting comments from Hofmann, for inst on "finish" vs. "ending," and whether K ever did the former.

Do the marketer think if your eyes glaze over it or instantly forget what you just read? Are these working for other people?

Can't you apply similar reasoning to most marketing and advertising in general? It all feels profoundly stupid once you give it a second thought but either it works or it's been a 100 year con game.

oh man that kafka edition sounds unmissable

Daniel - These publishers probably don't have a big boardroom to please and I'd imagine most people writing the blurbs probably have some fondness for the genre they're working at. They sound like small operations these days if many of them can't even afford proofreaders.

There’s a funny bit in Frederik Pohl’s memoir, The Way the Future Was, about when he was writing blurbs.

I got that in a charity shop recently.

I guess if a proofreader hasn't been near it then the blurb writer probably hasn't read it either. But still lots of reviewers I admire go into lengthy plot synopses that I find totally useless.

Re: My posting of Ian Sales' review of Corey's Leviathan Wakes some months ago; even back then I knew Sales' tastes were at odds with mine in many ways but more and more I'm finding his reviews pompous and silly and his blind spots seem bigger than ever. But still, when he loves something it usually sounds really cool, so I still value him.

Did you ever read the Apollo Quartet?

No, but I do want to.

Did you post a link months ago or years ago?

I think it was months ago

I love Ian Sales's fiction, which is perceptive and subtle and clever, which is why I am so puzzled as to why his reviews are almost brain-damaged. He repeatedly assumes that the presence of something bad (ie racism, slavery, etc) in a book means the author approves of it.

I'd credit him with slightly more than that. He's worried about the normalization of certain depictions and subjects but I still think he's wrong. He might have half a point about people enjoying fascistic things in fiction but I think we're healthier to find a place to enjoy that kind of stuff rather than trying to go without it entirely; it's a balancing act that can be done with care.

And he criticized a writer for having detailed descriptions of the way characters look, as if that were old fashioned.

I seen something similar with another reviewer assuming that Somtow thinks child abuse is funny because he written about child exploitation in an extreme absurdist black humor way. But I think they were probably being dishonest about that.

From early last year. Peter Nicholls being the guy who started the SF Encyclopedia.

‘Science fiction writers are the hounds of hell. They raise their shaggy black heads and sniff the wind, and feel the future coming,’ the late critic and editor Peter Nicholls once said. ‘And then they howl.'

Can the same be said of writers of other forms of speculative fiction? What do the future and alternative worlds imagined by Australian authors say about our country today?

At this special event at the Wheeler Centre, we hear readings from some of this country’s leading contemporary writers of speculative fiction – Claire G. Coleman, Rjurik Davidson, Marlee Jane Ward, Jack Dann and Peter Nicholls's children, Jack Nicholls and Sophie Cunningham. They share thoughts on the foundational Australian fantasy, sci-fi and dystopian texts, and consider how local writers are expanding and subverting genre traditions.

https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-476-twenty-one-minutes-with-peter-watts/
Bleak and angry but good

This science talk from two years ago manages to be scarier than the interview above.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v4uwaw_5Q3I

Oh yeah, Peter Watts is always a trip; we talked about him some, up this thread and maybe the prev. Rolling Speculative. What's a good anthology of/or other gateway to Australian science fiction?

Yeah, I've seen another one since with him talking about data privacy and it was also good. There's a bunch more talks and interviews I want to get to.
I heard someone say Starfish is a great novel of underwater horror so I'm considering starting with that instead of Blindsight, but I'll probably go for Blindsight.

The way I look for those kind of anthologies is searching the country or whatever region on isfdb on both "fiction titles" and "all titles" categories; I've never quite understood how/why these are categorized exactly. Ctrl+F search "anthology" and see whatever takes your fancy.
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=australian&type=Fiction+Titles
http://www.isfdb.org/cgi-bin/se.cgi?arg=australian&type=All+Titles

Thanks! Might have known Hartwell would get in there, maybe I'll start with this:
Title: Centaurus: The Best of Australian Science Fiction
Editors: Damien Broderick and David G. Hartwell
Date: 1999-07-00
Although User Rating: This title has no votes

Kind of interesting defense of Heinlein's Starship Troopers by David Gerrold.
https://www.facebook.com/david.gerrold/posts/10220700705479880

🧐

Now, putting aside the observation that all science fiction since Heinlein is either imitation of Heinlein or reaction to Heinlein

do go on

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/en/a/ad/JGBallard.jpg
HI DERE

Maybe I shouldn’t go there but wonder if DG’s Heinlein fetish is discussed on this thread

this is kind of funny because david gerrold's most famous work is a star trek episode with a concept that he (inadvertently, he says) stole from an old heinlein novel

Oh yeah, totally forgot that once completely obvious to me fact. D’oh!

I've never read Starship Troopers (or any Heinlein yet) so I don't have any dog in that fight but I don't buy that at all that Heinlein was that important that you're inevitably dealing with him because there's already so many SF traditions that have nothing to do with him.

When I've been reading about international science fiction it seems that multiple countries had their own right wing militaristic SF writers and I wonder how independently they are developing. Sometimes one author gets too much credit for something that was in the air at the time; see people (admittedly a miniscule number) discussing how many weird fiction authors developed very similar ideas independently of each other, in different languages.

I've wanted to start Heinlein with Door Into Summer and Moon Is A Harsh Mistress but despite all the warnings I've had, somehow the beautiful cover art of Stranger In A Strange Land gives me a good feeling about what all my better judgement tells me will probably be a terrible slog (it's a big book), sometimes a cover speaks to me in a way that makes me feel it was powerfully inspired by the text.

Here's Blaylock for Jon Lewis, but this one really doesn't go much over 10 minutes. I hope they expand them to 15 minutes because I'm often disappointed when they do stick to the time frame.
https://jonathanstrahan.podbean.com/e/episode-477-ten-minutes-with-james-p-blaylock/

i think gerrold's post is ludicrous. heinlein was not a deep thinker or even an interesting one, and only someone already inclined to hero-worship him (like gerrold) could think that the ideas in books like starship troopers were nuanced. he was basically just a standard-issue goldwater republican -- someone who hated the government except when they were bombing the shit out of other countries. i like some of his early novels and stories ok, but stranger in a strange land is one of my least favorite novels by anyone.